Joe Biden will run for President in 2016 says New Republic editor

Noam Scheiber, Senior Editor of The New Republic, says Vice President Joe Biden has been working towards running for President of the United States in 2016 for years, despite the fact that he would be 74-years-old when he is inaugurated.

A longtime adviser to the Irish American politician told the New Republic, “Biden has a special call on a lot of people’s loyalties, starting with the president. That’s why you’ve got to take him seriously. And he’s serious.”

Biden traces his maternal Finnegan roots to Louth and Mayo and has stated that Wolfe Tone, the Irish patriot, is his political hero.

The columnist seems confident that Biden’s punishing schedule during this election is part of his plan to follow in the steps of Walter Mondale, George H W Bush, and Al Gore.

In the upcoming magazine, Scheiber refers back to a CNN interview with Candy Crowley in 2011 during which Irish American Biden said he was not “closing that door,” in reference to running for the position of the President of the United States.

At the time he said “I wouldn’t have run for president in the first place—and I don’t think the president would have picked me—unless he thought I’d be good at the job.”

Scheiber said during this Presidential Campaign Biden’s going to extravagant lengths to ensure that Barack Obama gets reelected to the White House. It seems he hopes that Obama will award him with support when the time comes.

He writes, “There is, quite simply, no speech Biden won’t deliver if it advances the White House cause, no attack on Mitt Romney he won’t wage, no annual convention of Pacific Islander flight attendants he won’t attend on the president’s behalf.”

One of Biden’s advisers told the New Republic, “To some extent, he’s put himself in a challenging position [for 2016] by playing by the rules of the Obama political operation and not doing a lot of the prep work, particularly around fund-raising, you would ordinarily be doing by now.”

The advisor agrees that Biden could inherit the “key players on President Obama’s political team” including Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager. The adviser said, “Jim and the vice president have built up a nice relationship these past four years.”

Similarly, Rufus Gifford, Obama’s chief fund-raiser,could link Biden to useful donors. “I know [Gifford] felt the vice president has done a great job. He could be instrumental in pulling together money for this,” said the adviser.

The next step is having ties to the “traditional Democratic constituencies, such as labor, trial lawyers, and African American, Jewish, and gay groups and donors,” all of which Biden has been working on and achieving over the past four years.

Biden’s adviser admits, “Other than Hillary, he doesn’t consider any of the names lurking beneath the surface as competitors.”

Although Biden has developed a great many good relationships in “Obama Inc” the team itself continues to have a number of “hang-ups” about the VP. A senior administration official told the New Republic “They think he talks too much. He’s a nice guy, but I don’t think they think he’s the [future] president.”

The article goes on to refer to “Biden’s college-roommate-at-a-wedding reception sense of tact isn’t the damage it inflicts onObama, which is minimal. It’s the damage it inflicts on Biden himself.”

Ultimately it seems that the attraction of Joe Biden remains a paradox “The vice president has always been compelling enough to send Democratic strategists daydreaming. But, no matter how good the strategy, Biden always finds a way to step on Biden in the end.”